Careful Going To Dinner With New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta

The Wall Street Journal has a nice catch-me-up on new MySpace CEO and former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta. Our takeaway: Boy does the guy know how to network and negotiate over dinner.

There’s the Facebook-Microsoft deal:

Mr. Van Natta played a key role in negotiating a new round of financing in 2007. At a dinner in his Palo Alto, Calif., home with Mr. Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Mr. Van Natta played hardball, say two people familiar with the meeting. Soon after, Microsoft took a 1.6% stake in the company in a deal that valued Facebook at roughly $15 billion.

And Owen’s appointment to MySpace CEO, too:

Mr. Van Natta continued to weigh other possibilities. He interviewed with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch about the chief digital officer position, according to people familiar with the matter. Several weeks later, after Mr. Miller was named to that post, he started conversations over dinner with him about the MySpace chief executive job.

Forget paying the check. Owen might have you out hundreds of millions by the time the espresso arrives.